I'm interested in learning to Skin Driveline... where to begin?

I don't know anything about making skins, but noticed lots of other Front Ends have skins, and I want to try my hand at it, maybe coming up with a few color variations and stuff like rounding corners of boxes and buttons, and other fun stuff.

I think this is a good idea rray! I would love for peeps to work some of their magic on Driveline in the skin dept. It would surely help out Clockwork, so that instead of skinning could be coding better and more features. I think it's mostly xml stuff but Clockwork will clarify and offer pointers as needed.. Good luck SNO

I spent the evening messing around last night, and found I could change the look of buttons by overwriting them with .png files named the same as the original. That has me thinking I could possibly create my own using a drawing program. I have Corel Draw, so I am going to mess around with that some tonight. I seen some buttons out there that look wet and almost 3D, so now I want to play around with that idea.

I've been a little tied up for the last few days. But I saw your video, and I can see that you're playing with the skin files. Looks like you're getting the hang of it pretty quick. If you have any questions, let me know. I should be more available during the week, and be able to write up some info about the skin files.

Google Image search is a good place to find icons. I recommend using PNG for everything, as it supports transparency, and is a lossless compression.

I wanted the skinning system in DriveLine to be self-explanatory, and I also wanted to make it so the skins control as much of the program as possible. This way, you can make DriveLine look completely different, and still function the same (or function completely differently). From looking at your rapid progress on modifying the skin, I think maybe I achieved my goal.

It's great to see someone else's ideas for the layout and images. If you want, I can look into creating a "Skins" sub-forum and you can have a thread for your skin. There aren't a ton of DriveLine users, but some additional skins might help change that.

Also, if your media files/folders contain multiple artwork images (ie front and back covers), clicking on the album art will cycle through all available images for the current media.

Because I know so little, I just overwrote the .PNG files in the DefaultSkin folder, and added fonts to the Fonts folder , and in the RRAY folder I modified the layout in the Skin_Frame_Visualization, and set the font in the Skin_SkinVars file.

What I am wondering is if I should have put the .PNG files somewhere else, or if they will be overwritten when new versions are loaded?

I had done all that skinning in notepad, then starting up Driveline to see how the changes look. It's kind of slow going.

I was wondering if there is a way to see screens in a window, kind of like when using the old MS Frontpage to make a web site let you see the page as it would look on the web, but another screen let you see it as html looks in notepad?